


Blue Eyes and a Smart Mouth

by nagi_schwarz



Series: Marks [1]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Character Death, F/M, M/M, Mild sexytimes between John and Nancy, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-12
Updated: 2016-04-12
Packaged: 2018-06-01 22:40:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6539386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagi_schwarz/pseuds/nagi_schwarz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Not quite a soulmark AU. <i>John Sheppard really was just like everyone else. Really. He totally had a Compatibility Mark. Sometimes.</i> John Sheppard's compatibility Mark forms to match the Mark of whoever he's in love with (and fades if he falls out of love with them or they fall out of love with him). Everyone on the Atlantis Expedition has rare Mark Types. John, whose Mark faded after Nancy fell out of love with him, starts to develop a new Mark, and it belongs to a certain scientist with blue eyes and a smart mouth. Written for the Love Springs Forth challenge. Prompt <a href="http://story-works.livejournal.com/1412.html">here</a>, basically the seeds of romance are planted.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blue Eyes and a Smart Mouth

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to the unparalleled [](http://brumeier.livejournal.com/profile)[brumeier](http://brumeier.livejournal.com/) for her excellent beta services.

John Sheppard really was just like everyone else. Really. He totally had a Compatibility Mark.

Sometimes.

Dave had been born normal. His Compatibility Mark was on his left ankle (and looked kind of like a butterfly, but John had been warned sternly about making fun of him for it). It wasn’t a very rare Mark, but it wasn’t a common one either, so Dave went on a steady enough stream of dates with girls of the same Mark Type (and from suitable families) once Mom and Dad had decided he was old enough to date.

Everyone assumed John’s Mark was somewhere he couldn’t show it off, so no one knew what it was, and Dave Sheppard and the rest of the boys and girls who were part of the Sheppard social circle had never dared to ask. (After some of the old scandals where gold-diggers had had their Marks surgically altered to match the types of wealthy men from prestigious families, keeping one’s Mark Type discreet was important among the ‘right crowd’).

John thought he was a freak (he had _no Mark_ ) until he was fourteen and that really cute science advisor showed up at school. He was slender and blond and had bright blue eyes and a quirky mouth and John had heard about hormones and crushes but he’d never had a crush until he laid eyes on the older boy, and he had to start wearing a black wristband on his right wrist because a Mark was appearing. He’d noticed it one day in the shower. At first he thought it was a bruise or a burn from too-hot water, because it was like a red blush, tender on his skin. He couldn’t quite make out the shape of it, but then it started getting darker and darker, and the outline solidified - some kind of circular emblem, one he didn’t recognize, a rare Mark - and he panicked.

The only person he could trust was his mother, so he went to her, and he told her.

“Mom,” he said, “I think there’s something wrong with my Compatibility Mark.”

“Wrong with it how, sweetie? Do you need to see a doctor?” She was tinkering at the piano.

John took a deep breath. “I - I never had a Mark before. I looked and looked and looked. And now I have one, only it’s fuzzy and unclear. I don’t know what to do.”

Mom closed the piano lid and turned to him, smiling. “Oh, Johnny, that’s so wonderful. Whose Mark is it?”

John faltered. “You - you don’t think I’m a freak?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “I knew as soon as you were born. The rumor that some babies are born without Marks and they come in later is just that, a rumor. I let your father think it, but when I looked you over, I knew. You must have gotten your Mark Type from me.”

“What Type?” John asked. His heart was pounding. All these years, keeping it a desperate secret, relieved at the snobbery of his social circle that allowed him to keep his secret, and all along he hadn’t been alone.

Mom drew him closer, her hands on his shoulders gentle. “Take a deep breath, Johnny. You’re fine.”

“How do you know? Mom, what’s going on?”

“You and I are special,” she said. “People in my family aren’t born with a Mark, but when we fall in love, the Mark we develop matches the Mark of the person we love.”

John blinked at her. “But I thought - I thought your Mark was a match for Dad’s from day one. Because you were meant to be.” His father had a very rare Mark Type.

“My Mark matched his when I fell in love with him and not a moment sooner.” Mom smoothed a hand over his terribly unruly hair, then leaned in and pressed a kiss to his cheek. “Let me see?”

He held out his arm and peeled back his wristband.

She laughed softly. “Ah. Not very clear. Just your first crush, then.”

John couldn’t help but blush. “Mom…”

“Who is she? She must be wonderful, if you like her.”

John ducked his head. “I, uh -”

“Oh. Who is he?” The gentle understanding in Mom’s voice was such a relief.

Even though those sorts of relationships were generally acceptable, Dad had made it clear early on that they weren’t for his sons, because he needed grandchildren to carry on the family business.

“I don’t know his name,” John said. “I just - he’s really cute. He’s a science advisor for the sophomores and juniors.”

Mom’s smile was gentle. “You were wise to keep this covered. And thank you for trusting me with this.” She kissed him again.

He replaced his wristband, and he went on his way. His Mark never grew any more distinct, because all he could do was catch glimpses of the older boy in the hallway, and then the boy left, went back to wherever he’d come from, and John’s Mark faded. He didn’t get rid of the wristband, though.

After that conversation with his mother, he kept an eye on her Mark, curious. Her Mark appeared on the left side of her neck. Sometimes she wore clothes with necklines cut to display it, other times she wore high-necked blouses or fancy jeweled collars to hide it.

It was around the time Mom and Dad started fighting (having hissed conversations behind closed doors before one of them - usually Mom - left the house) that John noticed: Mom’s Mark was starting to fade a little. The shape was still distinct, but the color was a touch paler. And with every argument, it got a little paler. Dave started spending an awful lot of time away from home too. Everyone knew he and his new girlfriend Kathy were going to get married. She was from the right family and had the right Mark Type, and basically Dave and Kathy were Meant To Be. John knew the wedding was on when Dad took Dave down to the family vault one night to look at the Sheppard Wife diamonds. Mom only wore them on special occasions, and after Mom was gone, they would go to Kathy.

But that wouldn’t happen for a long time.

John came slinking home after a disappointing time at the driving range (if Dave wasn’t going to stay home to endure frosty Sheppard politeness, John wasn’t either), and Mom was there. Sitting at the piano, plinking absently at the keys. Going to get his guitar and playing a song with her was usually guaranteed to cheer her up, but -

John sat down beside her on the piano bench instead. Her Mark was gone.

“Mom? Are you all right?”

“Johnny,” she said, “there’s something you need to know. People like us, our Marks aren’t entirely under our control.”

John frowned. “What do you mean?”

“You develop your Mark when you fall in love with someone. It fades if you fall out of love with them.”

John stared at the blank spot on her neck, eyes wide. “Mom --”

“It also fades if they fall out of love with you. Be careful with your heart, Johnny. This world isn’t as safe for us as it is for everyone else.” She kissed him on the cheek, and then she stood up. “Go. Wash and dress for dinner.”

When John came down for dinner that evening, Mom was wearing one of her soft cream turtleneck sweaters. She drank a little too much wine, and somehow she and Dad never spoke to each other directly.

There was another hissed conversation behind closed doors (John retreated to his bedroom with his guitar and turned Johnny Cash up a little too loud) but somehow the next morning, Mom and Dad were smiling and talking to each other and kissing and Mom’s Mark was back, as bright and blooming as ever, like flower petals had been unfurled and pressed against her skin for safekeeping forever, and everything was okay. Dave and Kathy started spending more time around the house.

And then Mom died in a stupid, stupid car crash, and John was numb, was turned inside out, didn’t know what to say or do, so he sat in the corner and tried to do and say as little as possible.

*

It was only a week after the funeral that Dad took Dave down to the family vault and _gave_ him the Sheppard Wife Diamonds, and John couldn’t take it. He waited a few days till he was calm enough not to just start breaking things, and then he went into his Dad’s office to try to have a rational conversation, but Dad wasn’t there (he’d been there mere moments ago). Open on his desk, though, was a file.

Some kind of medical file. John would have ignored it, but then he spotted Mom’s name in it, and he wondered if it had to do with her death, some kind of medical report, and so he went around the desk and looked at it.

And his heart stopped.

It was lies. All lies. Some doctor had written about Mom’s non-Mark, how she was some kind of mutant or sub-human, and how the Mark wavered with the slightest shift in her affections, and if it faded or changed at all, she was being unfaithful or --

John backed away from the desk, hands shaking. Dad didn’t know about him. Couldn’t know about him.

So John waited, and watched, and saw Dad flirt with younger, pretty women from The Right Families, even though none of them had Marks that matched his. He asked around to some of the girls he attended cotillions with, the ones who hated the white dresses and had little flasks of whiskey secreted away in their white beaded clutch purses.

There was a special type of henna a girl could buy, that matched the hue of a Mark perfectly, and if her parents tried to marry her off to some prig just because they had matching Marks, well, no they didn’t, not quite. It was the new feminism, they said. Change your Mark so you can marry whoever you want, because Marks were just a sign of compatibility, not true love. No one paid attention to the science. They told him where to buy the henna, because it was just as stupid for boys to be bound by their Marks.

So John bought some of the henna, and he made up a Mark to go under his wristband. Just because he could, he changed it up from time to time, so if someone did happen to glimpse it, however briefly, they’d never be able to identify it, recreate it, pass it on to someone hoping for an advantageous marriage into the Sheppard family.

John stopped talking to his father, and when Dad sat him and Dave down to talk about Being Sheppard Men and Family Responsibilities, John made his decision. He wasn’t going to be a businessman - he was going to be a soldier, because soldiers got to go far away, and no amount of shouting from a man like Patrick Sheppard would get John stationed somewhere just for his father’s benefit. Also, John was going to Stanford, because all Sheppard men went to Harvard, and John was damn well smart enough to get into Harvard, but he was going to the other side of the country.

When Dad found the acceptance letter and demanded to know why, John smirked and shrugged and said, “Better surfing.”

Dave shook his head in disappointment. John didn’t care what Dave thought. Dave’s wife was wearing the Sheppard Wife Diamonds, and they were blood diamonds now. John wanted nothing to do with it.

*

Nancy Lehane was beautiful, smart, and funny. The thing John liked about her most (besides the way she kissed and the way her skin and hair smelled and how she could make him laugh without even trying) was that she didn’t give a damn about Compatibility Marks. She didn’t display hers overtly (though he’d seen it a few times, when she’d let him get under her shirt), and she didn’t care about his, didn’t ask about it.

John knew he was in for it when he got home from PT with the Air Force ROTC one morning and was scrubbing down in the shower and his Mark was blazing bright. He hadn’t bothered with the special henna since he’d started dating Nancy, so to find that his Mark was this stark, this clear, was startling. He stared at the snowflake-looking thing and was so, so confused, because Nancy’s Mark didn’t look like this at all. Yes, hers was vaguely hexagonal, but not at all like a snowflake.

He caught her after her last class, walked with her from the poli sci building back to the apartment they shared. They chatted about their respective classes. She could sense he was nervous, but she didn’t say anything; she was waiting for him to go first. She did that a lot, let him buzz with emotion till he finally spat it out. As much as he hated it, he’d been raised a Sheppard, and emotions were weapons. He was cautious about giving them over to others.

“Nancy,” he said finally, “I...I’m in love with you.”

Happiness lit in her eyes. She leaned in and kissed him. “I know that’s not something you say lightly, John. Thank you.”

He breathed in the scent of her skin and felt his racing heart start to settle. “I - had to tell you. Because I even though I know you’re not very traditional about - about things, I wanted you to know.” He peeled off his wristband and turned his arm over so she could see the Mark on the inside of his wrist. “They don’t match. I know you don’t care, but I had to tell you, because people think it means less if they don’t match, and I do love you --”

She stared at his Mark for a long time. Then she started unbuttoning her blouse.

John blinked. “Nancy? What -”

She parted the fabric so he could see the Mark over her heart. “Look closely, John.”

John leaned in, peered at her Mark. He’d never looked at it too closely before, given her highly modernist views on Marks. And then he saw. Her Mark _was_ a snowflake, but she’d modified it. With henna.

“Oh,” he said.

Nancy’s eyes were bright with joy. “Our Marks match,” she breathed. “I’ve always had a rare Mark, and so I told myself it didn’t matter, I didn’t have to find a match, but -” She pulled him into a kiss.

They stumbled back into the bedroom and didn’t leave until the next morning.

A month later, John bought her a ring.

Three months after that, they were married, she in a white dress, he in his dress service blues.

And it was perfect. Until John’s commanding officers noticed how good he was, how quick with tactics, how brave in even the most dangerous situations, how he kept a cool head and came up with solutions when solutions seemed non-existent. And they started adding training courses on top of his piloting, started sending him on missions that were secret and under cover of darkness, and when he stumbled home, exhausted and numb, he couldn’t tell Nancy a thing.

He wanted to hold her close and breathe in her skin and listen to her perfect, steady heartbeat, know she was safe. But with every mission, with every _I can’t, it’s classified_ , his Mark faded a little more, because she was in love with him a little less.

Till the day he come home from a mission, still haunted by visions of the dead soldiers who’d lain in the back of his helicopter, and Nancy was gone, divorce papers and a ring on the kitchen counter. In the shower that night, while he scrubbed invisible blood off of his hands, he noticed his Mark was completely gone.

*

After everything went wrong with Holland, Dex, and Mitch, the powers that be sent him to McMurdo, and he didn’t bother painting on a fake Mark. He ferried people back and forth across the ice, he smiled at everyone, and he spoke to no one. Life was simple. All he had to do was wait till his time in grade was up, refuse to go up for promotion (they wouldn’t give him one anyway), and find something to do with the rest of his life. He was seriously considering taking a stab at a Millennium Problem and then spending the rest of his life blowing the prize money on bumming around as a surfer and trying to be a guitarist in a band.

His musings on Navier-Stokes were interrupted by a flying glowing squid that nearly killed him and the very important General he was transporting to the mysterious outpost. As it turned out, he had some kind of super alien gene, and if he wanted, he could help save the galaxy or something else heroically cliché. Since he had no better plans, and going to another galaxy had been one of his childhood dreams since he first saw Star Wars (a galaxy, far far away), he decided to go, but he flipped a coin just on principle.

As it turned out, pretty much everyone selected for the Atlantis Expedition was an odd duck, from the loud-mouthed (pretty-mouthed) Canadian physicist with the citrus allergy to the Czech engineer who hoarded chewing gum wrappers and turned them into modules for a fancy origami swan (he didn’t even chew gum and was desperate to finish the swan before they left for the Pegasus Galaxy, where gum was not available). It was almost a requirement to have very little in the way of personal ties to Earth, because there was a good chance the trip through the Stargate would be one way. John wondered if the lack of personal ties to Earth was at all connected to the odd fact that pretty much everyone on the Expedition bore Rare Marks, Marks that occurred in less than one percent of the population. The geneticists wondered if Rare Marks were related to incidences of the ATA gene, but so few people had the gene that there was no way to draw any correlation between the two.

Everyone on the Expedition had to register their Marks, and because so many of them had Rare Marks, more often than not they just had to sketch them onto the form because they didn’t show up on regular Mark maps like the kind used at most doctor’s offices. When John filled out his form, he made up a Mark, and he politely declined to let the base doctor photograph it (and if the doctor assumed it was somewhere intimate, well, that was his assumption).

Apparently the SGC had run into issues with Marks before. Some human populations on other planets didn’t have them at all, and those who did have them had strange notions about them. Anyone with a matching Mark had to be married, or people bearing certain Marks were revered or despised, so the rule was that no one displayed their Marks or any insignias depicting Marks. John was just fine with that, and he noticed plenty of people around the outpost sporting arm warmers or little scarves or fingerless gloves that were otherwise non-regulation with their uniforms. No one said anything about his wristband.

In fact, no one said much to him at all. It was obvious from the get-go that Colonel Sumner had heard about the black mark on his record. Chances were, some of the soldiers had as well. So when Sumner got in John’s face, John offered him a smile that was borderline insubordination and reminded him that Elizabeth Weir was in charge of this Expedition.

And then John was following a whooping marine lieutenant through the Stargate for the first time, and he stepped onto Atlantis. Which woke up under his feet, light spreading as he ascended the stairs, approached the covered consoles, explored the corridors. The city was waking up to welcome its new inhabitants. There was no time to think about Marks or compatibility or True Love, because there was a city about to drown, and then the Wraith, and then the city afloat and defenseless, and John, who’d expected to be a glorified light switch, was suddenly the ranking officer on the Expedition and in charge of the entire military contingent, a good chunk of whom probably suspected him of having murdered Sumner.

When McKay knocked on his door one morning, with a glowing green thing pinned to his chest, giddy as a schoolboy on a sugar high, John was confused. The guy had barely cracked a smile when they’d gotten positive readings on the MALP after the SGC’s gate first connected with Atlantis, and now his face was all lit up and he was practically dancing on the spot.

“Are you all right?” John asked.

“Beckett gave me the gene therapy, and I got this to work.” McKay puffed his chest out so John could see the glowing green, jewel-like thing.

“What is it?” John reached for his jacket and tugged it on.

“I found it in one of the labs. The Ancients were working on it. It’s a personal shield device. It makes me invincible.” McKay grinned. “Come on, hit me!”

John, half into his jacket, paused. “You want me to what?” McKay had broad shoulders and a muscular chest beneath his blue scientist shirt, but he was no soldier.

“Hit me,” McKay said again.

John finished pulling on his jacket, rolled his shoulders. “Are you sure?”

“Completely.” McKay grinned and beckoned. “Come on!”

John didn’t punch hard, but he did aim true, and -

“Ow!” John snatched his hand back, shaking it to ease the sting.

McKay beamed. “See? Invincible. We should try something bigger. Shoot me!”

John started to reach for his sidearm, paused. “We probably shouldn’t do this here.” They probably shouldn’t do it at all, but John had felt the shield when he’d struck at McKay, and the man was ridiculously smart. He was the chief science officer for a reason. The shield would hold.

“Where should we go?” McKay followed John as he prowled through the corridor.

“Somewhere neither of us will get hurt by the ricochet,” John said.

McKay tapped himself on the chest. “Invincible, remember?”

“In everything I’ve read, aliens tend toward energy weapons, for which ricochet isn’t an issue,” John said. “Like those Goa’uld personal shields - knives could get through those. The shield might have a blind spot for weapons the Ancients didn’t consider a threat.” He paused, consulted his mental map.

McKay trotted to keep up with him. “Good point. I read the literature on the device -”

“You can read Ancient?”

“Of course. Not as well as Jackson or Weir, probably, but I’m a physicist, not a linguist. Can you?”

“No. Could you teach me?” John asked, and immediately regretted it, because McKay was the CSO, surely he had better things to do with his time, but the man nodded.

“Sure. Pick a time. Write me into your schedule. This way - a balcony.” McKay turned abruptly, and John followed him onto, indeed, a balcony that overlooked some lower levels of the city and, more importantly, the ocean.

“It’s beautiful here,” John said. He’d been on every continent on Earth, and now not only was he on another planet, he was in another galaxy. “You been to other planets before this one? You’ve worked for the SGC for a while.”

McKay came to stand beside him, leaned against the railing, swept his gaze over the pale blue horizon. “No, I never went off-world from the SGC.” They fell into a companionable silence.

Finally, McKay said, “You ready for this?”

John nodded. “Yeah. Let me just - stand there. No, move over a little. If the bullet ricochets, I don’t want it to go back toward the living quarters. No one’s living down there. Toward me a bit more -”

John was no director, and McKay was no actor or model. John reached out to try to maneuver McKay into place, but his hands hit the buzzing of the shield, and McKay blinked. He shuffled to follow the direction of John’s hands not-quite-touching him, and John realized he must be grossly invading McKay’s personal space, but then McKay was standing in just the right spot, so John stepped back and drew his sidearm.

_Rule number one: do not draw your firearm unless you intend to fire it, and you’d better intend to kill what you hit._

“Ready?” John shook the memory of his drill sergeant aside and took a deep breath.

McKay didn’t look at all nervous. “Do it.”

John aimed at his leg, squeezed the trigger.

The shield flared when the bullet hit it. But there was no familiar ping of ricochet, just the bullet dropping to the floor with a soft _plink_. John policed his brass absently, because ammo was a limited commodity in this galaxy, and they had to reload and reuse what they could.

McKay cheered and actually did a little dance. “Yes! I’m invincible!” His wiggling brought him into the railing, and he hit it hard. The breath rushed out of him, and he started to topple over the side of the balcony.

“McKay!” John lunged at him, terrified, but he couldn’t touch him, couldn’t catch him, couldn’t -

McKay caught himself on the railing, eyes wide, breathing hard. And then he laughed. “I’m invincible, remember?”

John, beside him at the railing once more, looked down at the massive drop. “Are you sure?”

McKay’s eyes lit. “I’m a scientist. Let’s experiment. Smart with a smaller distance. Say...in Ops?”

Immediately John knew what McKay was thinking. “Everyone will think I murdered you.”

“I know you’d never hurt me,” McKay said, flapping a hand dismissively, and John was warmed by that inherent trust. “Come on. Let’s get to Ops.”

It was quite a trek from the Air Force living quarters to Ops, lots of stairs, but they were in no hurry.

“Say,” John said, ambling beside McKay, “why’d you ask me to help you instead of, say, another scientist? Or...Ford?” Ford had been at the Ancient Outpost in Antarctica for a long time before John got there. Surely McKay knew him better.

“We’re on a gate team together, right? You chose me. So I chose you.”

John mulled over that. One of the reasons he wanted McKay on his gate team was, well, the guy was brilliant. He’d read enough of SG-1’s AARs to know that having a science genius on the team was basically a requirement for any first-line off-world missions. SG-1 had had the benefit of having Carter, who was both soldier and scientist, so there were two soldiers on the team. Since McKay was a civilian through and through, Ford made good sense as the second soldier on the team. And Teyla made sense as a fourth, because she’d already traveled to multiple planets in this galaxy. She was a natural diplomat, and also a warrior in her own right.

He glanced sideways at McKay again, taking in the giddy bounce in his step and the way his ass looked in those pants and --

John brought that train of thought to a screeching halt.

Maybe he needed to rethink his motivations for having McKay on a gate team.

When they reached Ops, it was busy. People were still trying to figure out which consoles did what, and where to put things and store things, and they still hadn’t completely assigned out living quarters, which was an even bigger task now that they had Athosian refugees too.

John pushed those concerns aside (he couldn’t push them aside forever) and he and Rodney picked a spot on the balcony above the gate room.

The look on Weir’s face when she came into the gate room with Grodin and saw John shove McKay off the balcony was priceless. But McKay bounced to his feet, perfectly fine. He was so excited that Beckett’s gene therapy had worked, and after the stress of the first few days in Atlantis, successful gene therapy and some tech that could be really helpful in defending the city against the Wraith was a win, so John refused to let Weir’s mom-face dampen his good mood.

Because the universe hated John, it all went downhill from there. (Later, John would learn that this wasn’t the universe hating him so much as it was par for the course in any Stargate program: if it could get worse, it would.) McKay couldn’t deactivate the personal shield, and there was every chance he was going to starve to death. For a man who’d been practically poker-faced at the thought of going through the gate to Atlantis, he was capable of high dramatics, and no one seemed to be taking him seriously, but John was concerned, because apparently McKay was hypoglycemic, and not having food for long periods of time was more dangerous for him than for everyone else.

And then there was tension with the Athosians, because they were refugees and not soldiers and still no one knew how the Wraith had known to attack their settlement after Sumner and his soldiers arrived there.

And _then_ there was a lost child and Lovecraftian living shadows trying to suck the power out of the generators because the Ancients had been experimenting with things they probably shouldn’t have (just like a certain blue-eyed scientist who was looking increasingly pale and tired) and the discovery of the city transporters (that was a win, actually) and Ford nearly getting killed by said living shadow and the Ancient mousetrap not working and -

Teyla’s crazy idea was some kind of Hail Mary pass, but that was what they were down to. They gathered in the gate room and Grodin opened the gate, McKay pressed the button for the MALP to take the naquadah generator through to the deserted planet (and that was a good generator, they needed it, but they needed the shadow thing gone more), and then the darkness descended.

John had never been afraid of the dark as a child, but he was afraid of this.

The darkness flooded the gate room, and it spread, it grew, feeding off of the energy from the gate and the MALP and possibly the generator itself --

John caught the movement out of the corner of his eye, too late. McKay was heading down the stairs into the darkness, and he had that familiar green glow on his chest. John started after him, because what was he thinking? That darkness ate energy, and the personal shield required energy to power it, but then McKay was gone, vanished into the darkness, and he couldn’t hear John shouting his name.

“McKay? McKay! What the hell are you doing? Come back! _Rodney!_ ”

When the darkness started going through the gate, John’s heart skipped a beat. Rodney must have done something right, got the MALP working again, or -

The darkness vanished. The gate closed. Rodney lay on the gate room floor, unmoving, the shield device on his chest no longer glowing.

John charged toward him, fell to his knees, checked him over. Weir and Grodin were seconds behind him, and Weir found a pulse. Rodney had no burns on his face like Ford had, so the shield had to have held out enough to protect him, because surely the burns Rodney suffered would have been worse -

John’s panicked heartbeat started to slow when Rodney blinked, opened his eyes (had they always been so blue?) and he sat up slowly, pained. Weir radioed for a medical team, and Rodney had done it, he’d saved them all. When Rodney had finally deactivated the shield device earlier, Weir had hinted that it was fear that had done it, that her suggestion he use the shield device to go up against the darkness finally allowed him to deactivate it. Something about the wry turn to her mouth as she mentioned it hinted that she thought Rodney was a coward. At the time, John had been so relieved to see Rodney eat some food that he hadn’t thought much of it. Rodney wasn’t a coward - he was a scientist. John was a soldier. It was right that he’d taken the task of trying to lure the darkness into the mouse trap. And it was wrong that he’d stood helplessly by while Rodney charged into the darkness. Grodin’s later explanation that John couldn’t have used the personal shield device himself because it imprinted on the initial user didn’t make John feel any better about the unprofessional way he’d frozen in the face of danger, when he was supposed to be protecting this city and its denizens.

John stood beside Rodney’s bed in the infirmary with a couple of spare power bars for him to eat and watched him milk the sympathy from the nurses for all it was worth. The Athosian kids might have played Major Sheppard versus the Wraith in the halls and corridors of Atlantis, but the true hero today had been Rodney McKay.

At the end of the day, John stumbled into the shower to wash off the grime and stress of the day.

And then he looked down at his right wrist and saw a Mark beginning to form, an indecipherable circular shape, and he knew he was in trouble.

There was only one person that Mark could belong to, and he had blue eyes and a smart mouth, and John had chosen to put the man in front-line danger every time they stepped through the gate.


End file.
